The Profile of Political Science in Brazil

Abstract

Who does Political Science in Brazil and to what extent has the field’s recent expansion altered the historical mechanisms of hierarchy that have long structured it? While prior scholarship has examined the discipline’s late institutionalization and its dependence on foreign intellectual models, much less is known about how these dynamics manifest today in academic careers, research agendas, and systems of recognition. This article asks to what degree the territorial and institutional expansion of the discipline has fostered greater pluralism and diversity. To address this question, the study analyzes the institutional, thematic, and demographic asymmetries that shape scholarly production and academic prestige, identifying who the faculty members of Brazilian graduate programs in Political Science are, where they work, and what they produce. It draws on an original dataset constructed from Lattes and Google Scholar, combining descriptive statistics, topic modeling, and propensity score–matched regressions to estimate the determinants of academic impact. The results show that, once institutional, educational, and thematic factors are controlled for, gender differences in impact become largely attenuated, remaining significant only for metrics that are highly sensitive to continuous productivity. This suggests that gender asymmetries stem less from individual performance than from unequal opportunities and the biases embedded in evaluative metrics. Despite territorial expansion and the growing presence of women, the field continues to be structured by tightly knit training networks, institutional hierarchies, and regional disparities. By revealing both continuities and tensions, Brazilian Political Science appears to be reorganizing itself without entirely breaking from its historical legacies, pointing toward a more plural, equitable, and self-reflective discipline.